Affinity Enhanced

This creation aims to enhance the affinity progression system in two ways:

Affinity Events

Affinity events are gameplay events that can increase or decrease your active follower's affinity for you.

Most affinity events in Starfield occur in dialogue. Say things Sarah likes, and she might start to grow fond of you. Some affinity events are driven by extreme player action, like when Sarah rightfully dislikes when you murder and steal indiscriminately.

In addition to dialogue and extreme actions, this creation gives common, repeatable gameplay activities an impact on follower affinity. Now, for example, you can get on Sarah's good side simply by scanning everything in sight, like the good law-abiding explorer you are. Or you can get on her bad side again just as easily as getting high on the job. Common mistake.

The specific events which now affect follower affinity are as follows:

• Discharging a weapon in a public space
• Healing your follower
• Looting a corpse
• Modifying a weapon
• Stealing
• Pick-pocketing
• Crafting an item at a workbench
• Modifying a spacesuit
• Serving jail time
• Building an outpost module
• Consuming drugs
• Hacking a terminal
• Picking a lock
• Scanning flora, fauna, and resources with the hand scanner
• Mining a mineral deposit
• Harvesting an item from a plant
• Harvesting an item from an animal

It is possible for a follower to like, dislike, love, hate, or be indifferent to the actions above. Every follower has a different reaction to the above events, chosen thoughtfully by me in alignment with their character.

Story Gate Progression

The story gate system governs the progression of the different stages of a companion's story. It covers the handful of personal conversations you have and the stages of a companion's personal quest. It ensures that certain stages in a companion's story can only be reached after passing a specific affinity threshold and spending enough time with them.

This creation greatly increases the story gate affinity thresholds and time requirements. Now, companions won't start to gush about your time spent together on day zero, and it will be a more reasonable amount of time until companions start to become vulnerable with you.

Affinity thresholds have been increased by 25%. Paired with affinity events, you may reach these thresholds at about the same rate or quicker than you would have in the vanilla game.

Timer durations have been increased variably based on which events they trigger. For instance, deeper conversations will have longer lead-up times. All-in-all, the minimum time it takes to unlock every story gate has been increased from 7.5 hours to 10.

These are subject to change depending on how natural they feel. I made these changes in the interest of elongating companions' stories for long-term playthroughs, but I also want to strike a balance where progression doesn't feel too slow.

This creation overwrites many of the COM_Event_Action affinity event records and COM_StoryGate_AffinityRequired & COM_StoryGate_TimerDuration global variables. This creation utilizes no custom quests or scripting.

This creation is safe to install and remove mid-game.

If you'd like to leave feedback or report a bug, you can reach me at @skinnypig2 on the official Bethesda Game Studios Discord server, or through the Nexus Mods page for this creation: https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/6891